NoName
Posts: 2729
Joined: Mar. 2013
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| Quote (ArborealDescendent @ Mar. 05 2015,10:21) | ...
| Quote (NoName @ Mar. 03 2015,20:17) | And just because we can't observe, nor test, the notion that the universe was brought into existence last Thursday, complete with the appearance of age, and complete with memories of the early days of their lives prior to that wondrous day, when the Invisible Pink Unicorn, pbuh, doesn't mean we should rule it out, right?
I mean, just think of the social effects if we could show that this is true! Surely it must matter, matter enough for science to take seriously, and begin searching for the fingerprints of her awesome hoofs, right? |
Well I remember events from before last Thursday so there you go….. |
And what prevents the memories from being fake and having been "installed"?
| Quote | | This argument just as easily throws all of science into question. How can you disprove the Omphalos hypothesis? |
You don't, because the demand that you do so is self-defeating, and more pointedly, depends on unwarranted assumptions. The demand itself destroys science because it allows unproven assertions to require refutation regardless of their warrant, their grounding, any rational for accepting that the proposal to be defeated is true or to be taken seriously. Make that case, give me reason to suppose the Omphalos notion is strong enough that it must be disproved and we'll work on it. Absent that, it's like disproving the Lord of the Rings -- a category error. Absent any warrant for the vast number of assumptions required for the Omphalos 'hypothesis' and a demonstration that it is well-grounded enough to count as a serious contender for truth, it can be dismissed unless and until such warrant is supplied. The speculations of fiction are not scientific hypotheses, and cannot be take to be until and unless there is warrant, not just the free play of the imagination, to place them in that category.
| Quote | | In my opinion, only some kind of cruel and deceitful Creator would realistically implement such plans. |
Such deities are commonplace across world religions.
This points up both your culturally influenced prejudices and, more to the point, raises the issue that what matters is not whether or not there is an 'ultimate creator' but what characteristics it has. The notion that one can determine that a thing exists yet has no knowable characteristics whatsoever appears to be internally contradictory. Existence is not a predicate. We know things, in the purest sense of the term, by knowing at least some of their 'attributes', their 'characteristics'.
For the case of an 'ultimate creator', we need to know quite a great deal for mere 'knowledge of the existence of' to be meaningful, useful, impactful, whatever. To know of the existence of such a being, we must know at least some of its characteristics. Which ones we do know will certainly have great impact, but all of this is preceded by questions of what warrant we have for seeking such an 'entity', whether the requirements on said 'entity' can apply to anything categorized as an 'entity', what 'creation ex nihilo' means and enough about how it 'works' for the notion to be senseful, coherent, and not contradictory on the face of it. For that, there needs to be warrant for the search, and no such warrant other than "wouldn't it be nice if..." exists. Those fantasies either assign attributes without knowing whether they do, let alone can, apply or stop with the error of taking existence to be a predicate, an attribute that can be known independently of any and all others.
| Quote | | By studying the nature of god |
presumably a typo for 'good' | Quote | | and evil, I suspect we can rule them out. |
To do that in ways that are useful to any scientific enterprise, we need clear, coherent operational definitions of the terms, absolute rigor in their usage despite their manifestly equivocal standing in everyday language.
It is also entirely unclear how such an operational definition could be discovered to apply. It is also entirely unclear why such a characteristic, if 'good' and 'evil' are characteristics of entities rather than acts, should apply to, let alone constrain, an 'ultimate creator'.
| Quote | What I call “evolutionary ID” (evoID), in my opinion, is not analogous to the five-minute hypothesis.
But I noticed you said nothing about Ken Miller’s quote. Do you accept that evolution exhibits form-function design? That evolution is a design process? Is what Miller says accurate? |
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I don't care about Ken Miller's quote. I'm not making his argument. I'm not required to have a positive argument. You're the one making positive claims, ones that from my position are outlandish and unsupportable. All I need to do is show your arguments, such as they are, fail. If they apply to Miller, so much the worse for him. If they don't, so much the worse for your attempted argument from authority.
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